(replies inline)

On Thu, 02 Oct 2014, Stephen Connolly wrote:

> On 2 October 2014 16:59, R. Tyler Croy <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > I already gave Kohsuke these opinions in person yesterday, but I don't
> > think this is solely his problem so I wanted to bring it up on the dev
> > mailing list.
> >
> > It's important to me that this is a constructive discussion and we talk
> > about how we can do things better moving forward.
> >
> > IMO there's a few problems with the way we have handled security advisories
> > in the past:
> >
> >   * Low feedback times to researchers who discover vulnerabilities. One
> >   example I found in core, the submitter of the SECURITY issue did not get
> >   feedback for one calendar month on the issue. This is a problem as some
> >   security researchers are of the opinion that if they don't hear back from
> >   a vendor in a timely manner, they should disclose to the public in order
> >   to get the hole closed.
> >
> 
> Yep. No disagreement that this is an issue.



Do you have any ideas on how we can improve the feedback times? Is it just a
matter of getting more people involved in the SECURITY project?



> >   * Lack of transparency to the Jenkins community into the SECURITY project
> >   in JIRA.  I'm not of the opinion that SECURITY should be a publicly
> >   visible project in JIRA but we *must* come up with some criteria to give
> >   people access that prevents Kohsuke from being the only one paying
> >   attention.
> 
> There is a mailing list of people... they all seem rather quiet a lot of
> the time... granted I am one of those people too... so tarring myself with
> the same brush


Here I was thinking I was on, or knew of, every Jenkins mailing list. Is there
another list I'm not aware where security issues are discussed?

On a related note, how are plugin developers who maintain plugins which have
vulnerabilities disclosed against them looped into these conversations?



> >   * Vendor notification, by virtue of Kohsuke being a Cloudbees employee
> >   they were aware and able to update in a timely manner, but I do not
> >   believe we communicated with vendors like Shining Panda CI,
> 
> 
> If it is critical to them, then they should ask to be part of the
> security-cert list. I do not see anyone stopping responsible parties from
> being advised. OTOH if they are relying on us to do all the donkey work and
> then complaining that we are a little bit more prepared because of that
> donkey work... I have slightly less sympathy.
> 
> In general I find the community involvement on the jenkins-cert list less
> vocal than I would like to see.


See previous comments about non-public lists.


I'm not sure we need to do any donkey work to feed updates to vendors relying
on Jenkins, I think having a process where somebody can sign up for pre-release
notifications for public Jenkins instances would be valuable. I would imagine
that the Shining Panda folks, OpenStack, FreeBSD, ASF and a number of other
organizations would gladly fill out a form to subscribe to early access to
security notifications or fixes.


> > who rely on publicly facing Jenkins instances, that there was a big release
> > coming before it was publicly announced. I don't think we should tell all
> > companies using Jenkins before a public announcement, but I do think that
> > maintaining a list of companies and organizations that run Jenkins as a
> > public service should get a few hours of lead time.
> >
> 
> If you are on the cert list you would have had all of the LTS RC testing as
> foreknowledge... at least for the CVE-2014-3666 (if you have not upgraded
> your Jenkins to a version with the fix for that by the time you read
> this... stop what you are doing and upgrade it already)



- R. Tyler Croy

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